The web has become an important vehicle for establishing and maintaining a business presence in the global economy. For example, retail stores, catalog companies, service industries, airlines, publishers, realtors, and others have increased business by establishing and maintaining web sites that display their products/services and allow users to view, select, and purchase the respective products/services. Electronic commerce (e-commerce) has become a viable and important way of conducting business.
Current state of the art methods for requesting and obtaining desired electronic information or selecting items for online purchase typically employ one of the following types of online methods. 1) Viewing an online catalog, selecting desired items, and by selecting desired items, putting them into an electronic shopping cart. These steps can be preceded by a request query and/or have query steps in between, as well as navigational browsing steps around the web site(s) of interest. This method works well for items that are identified primarily by pictures (such as clothing or groceries) or descriptions of item contents (such as books). This online method mimics a person's real life shopping routine: browse, select, purchase. 2) Entering of a formatted request (such as one item per line) to a web server. The items of such a request are typically obtained by an online search; wherein the output is generally presented to the user in a format containing descriptions, numbers, and useful information. While the search output format is user friendly in that it gives the user desired information, this same format, however, is not amenable to the ordering of items for purchase or download. Generally, the search output has to be adapted, reformatted, or visually parsed by the user before any items within can be ordered and purchased.
Document retrieval systems available online are typically coupled to a database search system. An example of such a system is the PubMed searchable database operated by the National Library of Medicine available at www.ncbi.nim.nih.gov/PubMed/. To locate journal articles on a certain topic, a user performs an author or keyword search of the PubMed database through a client browser. The result of the search is a list of journal titles and abstracts related to the search query. This list is presented to the user via the client browser. Depending upon the publisher of the journal article, there may be an option for the user to view the full text document by linking to it on the publisher's web page. In the PubMed system, the documents are stored in a distributed manner in each publisher's server. Additionally, many of the publishers require a separate login and/or subscription to their sites to retrieve journal articles. The nature of this architectural setup requires that each individual document be selected and downloaded. Hence, while documents can be “retrieved” over the Internet by initiating the process at a web site such as PubMed, the primary function of PubMed is to provide a searchable database.
Another document retrieval system is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,873,076. This patent discloses a database containing records referencing both text and multimedia files that can be queried by a user. The patent discloses natural language input by the user, semantic interpretation of the query, and weighted relevance of hits. Furthermore, it discloses that files that are associated with the result list are retrieved from various plural sources. As a consequence, the '076 patent discloses user accounting and tracking to each source to facilitate proper royalty payments. Like the PubMed example, the '076 patent architecture and user interface require individual documents or multimedia files to be accessed individually by the user by employing, for example, mouse clicks.